My current Work-In-Progress has started out of a short story. A short story that began purely as an exercise in planning: planning what the inciting incident would be, planning what the turnaround would be, planning how to resolve everything and planning a characters’ development, all across a few thousand words.

I’m actually quite happy with the story. True, there were difficult parts, but on the whole, I like how it turned out.

The interesting thing is that it has led to the promise of a massive amount of world-building. This is something I haven’t seriously done in far too long. World-building is something I have done on and off for decades. It usually began with a map – yes, a literal map, drawn with pencil and paper, full of a completely fictious landscape and littered with invented names. Then these names would be turned into descriptions of the peoples, the cultures, the languages, the history, the religion, the magic… all sorts of things. It was one such world that formed the setting for my ’09 NaNoWriMo effort.

Now I’m building a new world. This one hasn’t started with a map, at least not on paper. But that’s being rectified.